1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an interactive technique for automatically finding and organizing items similar to example items.
2. Description of the Related Art
Most computer users organize items, such as files, e-mail messages, tasks, URLs, etc., to manage necessary and useful information. The most common form of organization involves some form of hierarchical folders in which these items are placed. These folders and items can be at the system level via the file system or internal to a particular application, such as a mail client or a Web browser. In some cases, the application, for example, Microsoft Internet Explorer, provides a hierarchical organizational mechanism, for example, “bookmarks”, which is directly transformed into a file system hierarchy, such as the “Favorites” folder in the “Windows” directory. In other cases, for example, Microsoft Outlook, the hierarchy is maintained internally.
Several “find tools” enable users to search for and display items matching certain attributes, for example, names, date-time, items containing specific keywords, etc., across the folder hierarchy at various levels. Some allow the query and the search results to be saved as an item, for example, a “shortcut” in the file system, while others combine a folder with the query expression as its property, conceptually creating a “search results folder”. Clicking on the folder displays items that satisfy the query and show up temporarily as items inside the folder.
Several information retrieval techniques exist for gathering documents and building a vector representing the documents both singly and in combination. Vector space methods can then be used for analyzing document similarity, which in turn can be used for classifying documents into categories. Various techniques for building the vectors and carrying the classification and adapting the query vectors based on past results have been studied and reported.
The AltaVista Discovery tool shows items similar to the current Web page that the user is browsing. Alexa similarly provides a “Related Links” capability with the same functionality.
None of the above-noted techniques help in organizing related items by displaying suggestions which in turn can be made part of the organization nor does a change in the organization immediately trigger any suggestions. Furthermore, none of the above-noted techniques takes advantage of vector-space information retrieval, nor do commonly used “find” tools, that is, tools used to find similar items, with or without associated organization metaphors, provide suggestions based on similarity of content to prototypical example documents.